The Ones Who Stayed
September 5, 2025 - September 7, 2025
Tomorrow Lab ✖️ A Space Gallery ✖️ Memor Museum
Artists:
Xin Liu
Sofia Rodriguez
Jade Sun
Yuchen Tu
Joice Cheung
Lingyi Li
Keming Chang
Mona McKinstry
Deepa Mahajan
Hui Gao
Isabel Padilla Soto
Emiri Fujimoto
Yuzhuo Wang
Yichen Ji
Mona McKinstry
Xianzhi Fu
Jiatong Han
Kexin Zhang
Weiyu Tian
Tong Wang
A Space is pleased to present The Ones Who Stayed, a group exhibition that reflects on belonging, endurance, and transformation. In a world shaped by movement and displacement, the question of who stays and at what cost, unfolds as both personal and political. Rather than a static condition, staying emerges as a fragile negotiation: between systems and selves, isolation and connection, loss and renewal.
We are living in an era of uncertainty, where identity and belonging are constantly negotiated. For many who come to study or work abroad, the decision to "stay" is not just a choice—it is a struggle against systemic barriers, isolation, and invisible weight.
Instead of clear paths, life becomes an ongoing process of adaptation, resilience, and redefinition. This exhibition seeks to make visible what often remains hidden: the cost, the courage, and the fragile hope behind staying.
The Ones Who Stayed is a collective exploration of endurance and transformation. Through immersive rooms, personal objects, and stories, the exhibition creates a living archive—a space where narratives of struggle and perseverance intersect, inviting audiences to witness and reflect.
Xin Liu’s Selected by What Has Passed and The Mechanism of Our Society transform personal and collective histories into visual meditations on migration, selection, and the invisible forces that shape lives.
Sofia Rodriguez’s Aliens transforms pop aesthetics into protest. Set against a distorted American flag and encased in wire, faceless ceramic figures evoke the trauma and resilience of immigrant life at the U.S. border.
Jade Sun’s The Migratory Bird traces the quiet disorientation of transience. Reflecting on years spent between Tianjin and New York. Yuchen Tu’s I Know You guys Asian, But Which One? u all look
same ！——stereotypes, crafted from Song Brocade and Xiangyunsha, confront the flattening gaze of Orientalist fantasy.
Joice Cheung’s Unfolding memories of pond gives quiet form to the endurance of staying. Through layered, delicate sculpture, she evokes the unseen weight of displacement.
Lingyi Li’s intimate sculpture preserves a strand of hair as a quiet record of migration and change. Held by a latch that opens and closes, it becomes a living relic—balancing presence, memory, and the unknown future
Keming Chang’s Today’s Entry transforms a ceramic mini fridge into a quiet vessel of survival. Worn yet tender, it archives the emotional weight of daily routine—where comfort and exhaustion coexist, and care persists in the smallest rituals.
Mona McKinstry’s Fragmentada weaves a personal archive of migration and longing. Through documents and keepsakes—phone cards, boarding passes, biometric records—she traces the emotional distance between departure and arrival, stitching pain into memory and identity.
Deepa Mahajan’s the distance between us maps the emotional weight of separation through fractured prints affixed to plaster forms. Hui Gao’s Borrowed Flame captures a fleeting moment of warmth between temporary lives. Rendered in smudged oil pastel, the glow of a shared cigarette becomes both light and language—an ephemeral connection in a city of constant departures.
Isabel Padilla Soto’s work mourns the loss of her grandmother—her second mother—during a Brooklyn winter she could not leave. Taken during the pandemic, the image captures two dark figures facing a frozen park, evoking the quiet grief of absence and the ache of distance. Memory becomes both witness and barrier, as she brings flowers home to a place that no longer waits.
Emiri Fujimoto’s The Ones Who Stayed transforms western iconography into a fleeting performance of identity and impermanence. Yuzhou Wang’s Isn’t This Familiar turns American cityscapes into translucent memories, questioning how familiarity reshapes perception. Xianzhi Fu’s Ruins of the Self turns fractured identity into a luminous meditation on exile, belonging, and rebirth.
Jiatong Han’s Unfinished Perception II lingers in forests as a meditation on transience, resistance, and the fragile act of staying.Kexin Zhang’s Still Life transforms ordinary objects into a meditation on abundance, impermanence, and the fleeting cycles of desire.
Weiyu Tian’s Wheels transforms a familiar symbol of leisure into a transparent meditation on memory, repetition, and perception.Tong Wang’s Loving You Is Like Loving Death turns the desert drive into a meditation on direction, hope, and self-discovery.
Feiyang Yin captured the memory of the city with delicate brushstrokes, evoking the resonance of the twilight stroll in memory. The work wanders between reality and emotion, and it is an affectionate gaze on the quiet moment in the rhythm of the city.
Zhishen Li’s Street View captures the intimate imprint of place and time, transforming a familiar streetscape into a painted record of lived experience and memory.
VIC FU is a visual artist, photographer, video editor based in New York. Her artwork explored the connection of nature and the body which involves video mapping, sculpture, mostly mixed media work. She is now focusing on video installation and video arts.Xianzhi Fu’s Ruins of the Self turns fractured identity into a luminous meditation on exile, belonging, and rebirth.
Together, the works in The Ones Who Stayed reveal staying as an act of endurance and reinvention. Beyond survival, it becomes a space where vulnerability and hope coexist, and where new forms of belonging quietly take shape.
Installation View
